Data storage in a database and access therefrom is a common theme in most digital data access and storage systems. With today's hardware capabilities, the size and complexity of databases, and the amount of data stored therein is almost unlimited. With the number and size of databases available, researchers face a daunting task when performing searches related to a particular topic or subject matter. These difficulties are further compounded with data from the public domain (Internet, public databases, Web services, etc.) that all contribute to a large “haystack” within which a researcher must find a “needle.”
In addition, because information is distributed among a large number of resources, a researcher is faced with the prospect of running queries in a number of databases on each subject matter or topic of interest. When additional subject matter related to the subject matter or topic of interest is found in one of the databases, a researcher must once again query many different databases with the additional subject matter.
For any given query, the researcher also may be faced with sifting through potentially thousands of documents in order to determine the relevancy of the query results. When the researcher is also interested in physical geographic locations related to subject matter or topic of interest, separate or combined geographically based queries must be initiated in each of a number of databases, with the query result again being up to thousands of documents that must be individually reviewed for relevancy. As relevant documents are identified, the researcher is also faced with organizing the documents, or information contained therein, to provide visually coherent results of the research that reflect the relationships between the various identified sources of information. Also, the researcher may need to remember the series of queries and other steps that were performed to find the relevant information for purposes of recreating the results or performing a similar research project on a different topic.